The protagonist of Kaveh Akbar's debut novel, Martyr!, wants to die. This is not, as you might think, the wish of an elderly man, or a person with a terminal disease, but the preoccupation of a Iranian American named Cyrus Shams, a queer, healthy, young poet and an acrobat of the American idiom I was happy to spend time with. Cyrus lives in the same midwestern town where he graduated from college and works at an assortment of unusual low-paying jobs while he hangs out with his two friends, his roommate and sometimes lover, Zee, a Polish Egyptian, and their mutual friend, Sad James.
When the novel opens, Cyrus is sober after years of addiction. He understands that sobriety has extended his life miraculously, but nevertheless, he studies the lives of famous martyrs throughout history, writing poems to celebrate their sacrifice, and thinks about how he too might fulfill this calling. His mother was a true martyr, though her cause was unknown. She lost her life on the commercial Iranian plane shot down in 1988 by an American gunship. That infamous military error casts the penumbra Cyrus inhabits.
You would think that a central character with a martyr complex would spin himself into a dark, cerebral novel, but Akbar, like Cyrus, defies expectations. Martyr! is packed with humor because Cyrus, with his lachrymose personality, is always on the lookout for absurdity. This and the author's decision to render him through the filter of a third person point of view, lightens his tone. In addition, his narrative sections are surrounded by first person accounts from the people who populate his life and memories: his mother, his father, his uncle and Zee. Each has their own section in what feels like an off-recipe stew of voices. Cyrus too, is full of a dark cynicism that makes him alert to the strange and fantastic, and as this loosely constructed story glides towards a magnificent narrative turn that manages to be both unexpected and completely believable, the skein of humor that runs through the narrative prepares me. Akbar delivers one glorious linguistic stunner after another, often as a metaphor or simile, and though there are many examples to choose from, I'll pull one from the early pages.
Cyrus is with his sponsor, Gabe, after an AA meeting. They go to a local coffee shop and have this exchange:
"You okay?" Gabe asked.
"Yeah, I don't know. I probably slept funny or something."
"Or something, sure. Okay. God made of words, you're sad. Keep going." He took a sip of espresso which left a little moon of foam at the edge of his white mustache.
"That's it, really. The big pathological sad. Whether I'm actually thinking about it or not, it's like a giant bowling ball on the bed, everything kind of rolls into it."
"Maybe you don't believe God wants you to be happy? God, your mother, poetry, whatever. What makes you so special that everyone else deserves that except you?"
"What does that even mean? 'God, your mother, poetry, whatever.' I have no idea what you or Big Susan or Mike or any of those people mean when they talk about 'higher power.' Most of those guys probably mean an old bearded dude in the clouds who gets mad when I suck a dick, who sends all Muslims to hell. What use is that higher power to me?" Cyrus paused. "I've been reading all these ancient mystics. I think if I could find some Persian higher power, something in Islam..."
"Oh that's fucking bullshit." Gabe rolled his eyes theatrically... "You're the most American kid I know...You buy fucking vinyl records. We're having this conversation in Indiana, not Tehran."
Gabe was the only person in Cyrus' life, white or not, who spoke to him this way. There was something in it, a kind of old man punk "fuck-it"-ness Cyrus had long admired, even if it meant Gabe sometimes danced well past the third rail of political correctness. Still, however abstractly he envied Gabe's ability to speak unencumbered by the rhetorical hygienics du jour, in this specific instance, still harried from the episode with Dr. Monfort, Cyrus quickly grew flush with righteous fury" (24-5).
I've bolded the phrases that speak with precision about abstractions that are hard to pin down and be specific about (sadness and political correctness), but I also admire the clashing of verbal tones between the speakers, the older, wiser Gabe and the young, sharp-tongued Cyrus.
The turn the novel glides towards is the final absurdity and it shifts Cyrus's fundamental beliefs as nothing else could. But for a turn to work, the reader has to trust, and in this novel, trust is built with verbal pyrotechnics like the underlined phrases above that provide concrete, sensory language that lets the reader share Cyrus's feelings. The example also shows the narrator's humor, and that too is a quality that makes me happy to follow the novel wherever it wants to take me. When the turn appears, I have been prepared for it.
Akbar, Kaveh. Martyr! New York: Penguin Random, 2024.
Filed under: Preparing for an unexpected turn